Having It All by Not Doing It All: Goodbye Superwoman

By Pamela Hay

Being a woman today means a thirty-year rollercoaster ride. Professional women have been trying for decades to do it all at home and in the workplace, while still receiving less domestic support from their husbands than needed. The competing obligations and second-shifting leaves women with too little time and space for nurturing their own needs and exacts a heavy price on their wellbeing over time.

Women have learned how to lean in. Have they learned how to lean back? The effort to be superwoman is burning them out. There are better ways to lessen the load and stress. This book draws attention to the second-shift phenomenon and offers women better life strategies that can bring more joy, energy, fulfillment, and fun into their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jan 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504372718

Pamela Hay

Pamela Hay is a career diplomat, linguist, and world traveler who has spent decades interacting with women across different cultures and continents, observing the similarities in their lives, particularly with respect to managing the balancing act. She has taken her family on diplomatic postings within Asia and Europe and has recently returned to Canada.

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Copyright © 2017 Pamela Hay.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-7250-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7271-8 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 01/26/2017

Contents

A. DOING IT ALL

1. The superwoman ideal

2. Girls Just Wanna have Fun

3. Men do it better

4. Women as second-shifters

5. Work warriors and the professional impact

6. The Mommy Bias

B. WHAT’S WRONG WITH DOING IT ALL?

7. When Mama Ain’t Happy Ain’t Nobody Happy

8. How did Grandma do it??

9. Ladies just need longer

10. A longer road to go in some countries

C. HAVING IT ALL

11. Places where they got it right

12. Habit Makes the Man

13. Strategies for having it all

Prologue

This book is for all those busy and quite simply overburdened women out there who need better strategies for managing the balancing act.

In today’s world, most women succumb to the many demands on their time by cutting out me time in order to manage all of their obligations and fit them all into the limited time available. Studies show that women are still doing much more housework and care-giving than their men. This leaves them with too little time and energy for nurturing their own needs and has a decidedly negative impact on their own health and well-being, as well as on the very people who most need their support.

This is especially acute in the case of career women. For several decades, professional women have been trying to do it all. Their lives have become an enormous balancing act with so much to squeeze in and so little time. Women have learned how to Lean In. Have they learned how to Lean Back? The effort to be superwoman is burning them out. There are better ways to lessen the load and re-organize their lives. Once women take stock and find a new balance, they will be able to have more fun, joy, fulfillment, and better health and well-being.

A. DOING IT ALL

1. The superwoman ideal

A notion developed at some point during the last 30 years that women could have and do it all. The gender equality movement was gathering steam and western societies were making greater efforts to draw women into more significant jobs in the business world. Women were being offered the opportunity to break out of the stereotypical role of housewife, or part-time employee and find expression in professional fields. Their increased access to higher education was instrumental in this.

After all, what woman did not want to get the same opportunities as men? For generations, females watched their fathers, brothers and husbands get out there in the workplace and manage a full-time, challenging and rewarding career. The men brought home the paychecks, commanded the power and autonomy, honed their professional skills and talents, achieved recognition and praise, won promotions, built stimulating social networks, enjoyed on-the-job perks like free meals, company cars, company travel, company entertainment, made significant social impacts, and developed a large part of their self-esteem based on their work. Once women began to earn the same university degrees and equivalent credentials to men, why not get the same jobs and have the same rewards?

As women entered the workplace and worked their way up the ladder to becoming equals with men, the real juggling act began. Women thought that they could put in the same hard day of work as their male counterparts and somehow fit everything else into their lives too, confident that society would recognize the imbalances and make the necessary social adjustments to allow them to manage the balancing act. During this period, while women were contemplating such things, their men were still coming home from a hard day at work, throwing off their coat, putting up their feet, turning on the hockey game, mixing themselves a scotch or cracking open a cold beer and looking forward to the hot dinner being cooked by their wives, confident that they had done their hard work all day and now deserved to relax.

Women joined the rat race and most thrived. They learned how to navigate their way at work, clinch business deals, write policy, make laws, become subject matter experts, perform technical operations and organize major events. After this kind of stimulating but hard day at work, women would then scoot out of the office place and start the second shift. They would race home to the kids, or first to the daycare center to pick them up, then begin a marathon to prepare after-school snacks, feed and walk the dog, cook dinner, wash up, help the kids with their homework, drive the kids to Brownies or music lessons or hockey practice, discuss school and friendship issues, patch up scraped knees, throw dirty clothes in the laundry, get the kids ready for bed, read them a bedtime story, tidy up the house, and then sit back for 15 minutes and try to be a charming, relaxed wife for their husbands. But there aren’t 30 hours in a day.

With the clock ticking and still so much to do, they would jump back up and start making the kids’ bagged lunch for the next day, empty the dishwasher, refill dog and cat bowls, do the dog’s pre-bed walk, check e-mails, perform the house closure routines, begin all of the time-consuming bathroom facial cleansing and brushing rituals, and finally join their waiting husband in bed for an all-too-short night. They would then rise early to unload the dishwasher, prepare the family breakfast, re-load the dishwasher, dress the children, walk the dog, water the plants and complete all other necessary morning routines before doing personal preparations and dressing-for-success, in order to tackle another full and demanding day at the office.

Ladies, we would do that marathon day after day, and think we could sustain our superwoman efforts because we really wanted to prove we could make it in a man’s world. We thought the load would get lighter for us, but the days stretched into years and we were wearing out. It didn’t happen quite like we thought it would. There was talk of emancipation. Not quite. But why not?

Part of the career woman theory was that as women were finding their way in a man’s professional world, men would find their way in the home. Men would naturally begin to do more housework and childcare, thereby sharing and reducing the woman’s traditional household work load. Equality would have been achieved.

Guess what? That didn’t happen. Not anywhere in the world.

In the West, as well as in a number of developing countries, most women have entered the workforce decades ago, are already considered equals according to the law, and are holding down a full-time job. Societies have progressed and it has become the norm for a woman to have not only a job, but a lifetime career. Women’s careers today are, for the most part, as equally demanding and time-consuming as a man’s. Most families, except those in the narrow upper-class echelon, rely heavily on the second income of women to provide a reasonable standard of living for the family since the cost of living, inflation, and people’s living standards have all risen in most western countries. What family isn’t faced with a high mortgage or rent? For most families today, what a woman earns has gone from being discretionary to very essential.

Despite this, women still shoulder most of the responsibilities at home. Women are still doing most of the housework. This is the phenomenon which has become known as the second shift. Women are still handling the lion’s share of the housework, the care-giving for children, and the care-giving for elderly parents - in some cases also for extended family members, including the in-laws (Katz, 2015). The hoped-for redistribution of workload has hardly happened. And yet,